It saddens me that rather than recognize that God is with us
in our pain and suffering, crying when we cry, holding us when we tremble, wailing with us
in our pain, some
people think God is actually the one making us suffer, causing us to cry,
inflicting us with
fear, and torturing us with pain.
And whereas, it is the duty of nations as as well as of men, to owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions,
in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced
in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord: And,
in so much as we know that, by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements
in this world, may we not justly
fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment
inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole
People?